’Gitte passed through the room. She never says much. She usually comes in, rubs John’s shoulders or brings him a beer and then drifts out again. I think of her before I fall asleep at night. Of all the women in the world, I want her most of all.
I read in the paper that the government is working on a “neutron bomb” that will kill people but will leave all the buildings standing. This is reassuring. Reading Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone. Really great.
I’m fucked up.
April 22, 2006
I received a letter today from Sarah ending our “relationship.” She wrote that she didn’t want to “argue.” Wrote that I am “duplicitous.” I screamed at the notepaper clutched in my hand: “When did I lie to you, Sarah? When?” So that was it, I guess. Finished. Alone.
I think I’ll develop a functional relationship with an escort service and a maid. I’m sure I can find a couple of women who would be happy to fuck and cook for me. Pay the women, that’s what they understand. No strings. An up-front transaction.
I have money and so I will have the sex in the way I want it.
But sex alone, what is that? I want companionship. Right? “Love.” I don’t mind the underlying notion of a “relationship.” So, if I want to continue this, I will have to “win” Sarah back. How hard would that be? She’s the one good thing in my life. Also she has amazing breasts. She loves me. I should preserve this. I’ll call her tonight.
April 24, 2006
Sarah informed me that she’s not interested in any renewal. This made no sense because I know she doesn’t have the guts to choose solitude. After an hour on the phone, I extracted the truth: There was another man in her life. Of course. I felt better knowing the facts. Fuck her.
April 25, 2006
Drove into town to see Leon. We had lunch at Jean Georges. Waded into a quick summation of how I was recovering. He lost interest and began to scan the room for VIPs. I raised the stakes and confessed my new fear of orgasm. That got his attention. Anything having to do with sex interests Leon. He is under the impression that I have this tremendously active sex life and he is always trying to pry details out of me. He quoted something in Latin from his school days. It sounded like “agreeskeet medendo,” would have to look it up at the library. Eventually his tarragon artichoke and my mesclun salad (strewn with saffron and gold leaf) arrived. He troweled his bread with French butter, snapping it up like a trained seal. I imagined the butter lining the inner surfaces of his cardiac chambers, slowly occluding his life force, strangling him, bringing him to his knees, his face ruddy with pain, crumpling down before me, bowing before me, admitting he’s been wrong about my work, has always been wrong, and now, with his final breath, begging forgiveness.
Leon prattled on about himself until dessert was cleared away. From what he told me I gathered he’s sitting pretty because he has signed this new kid, Joe Versa. Four hundred thousand copies of the second novel are on order. There’s a movie deal. Etc. Etc. Blah-blah-blah. Not once did he describe the book itself. Obviously, the writing qua writing is of no interest to Leon.
That is, until I opined that Versa’s first-person confessional novel was obviously a pack of lies. This is the current fad, “truth.” I lectured Leon, “It’s too easy, this writing. Leon, I’m warning you, break your addiction to this loathsome shit now before it’s too late. This fake literature will destroy publishing and sooner or later destroy you. And me.”
Leon’s eyelids drooped with anger. I was spoiling his party. He was making money and I wasn’t big enough to congratulate him. I read his mind: By not accepting money as the final arbiter of worth, I was implying that there is some other yardstick by which to measure literature. And to defend that “other” yardstick is to defend what? “Good writing”? “Come on,” Leon would argue, “what’s that?”
Leon’s the big dog now and wants to piss on every tree. This translates into a mini-revolution. The artist is no longer on top, Leon is. I wanted to say “MONEY? I MADE YOU PLENTY OF MONEY, YOU ASSHOLE, BY WRITING GOOD BOOKS.” But that would sound desperate, wouldn’t it? Never show a hand until you’re ready to play it.
I noted an oil stain on Leon’s necktie. He’s not my friend and yet he’s the best friend I’ve got. The others. Where have the others gone? Only Leon and Sarah are left. And Elizabeth, maybe. Here are my friends as I enter midlife, an editor who is indifferent to my writing and two women who hate me.
Later I spoke with my father on the phone. His depression is widening, threatening to suck me in like an intergalactic black hole. I called him thinking I could gleen a droplet of pseudo-empathy. If not your own family, who? Papa, throw me a lifeline here! But every lifeline drags both ways. He’s stuck in his own dark, cold, bottomless-pit quagmire. He needs companionship too. I hung up the phone and let go my hold on the rope before he could pull me under.
All of this—the failure of the book, Sarah’s abandonment, Elizabeth’s threats, Leon’s indifference—conspires to defeat me. But they all underestimate me and my feeble, scarred heart. The mistake is presuming that I am close to death. Fuck my heart. I don’t need a heart. My next book will set them all straight. Leon will be wetting himself to get his paws on it. He has no idea what I am made of.
April 26, 2006
I looked up Leon’s Latin phrase. Aegrescit medendo. It means, “it grows worse by the remedy.” Now I can’t rememeber the context.
I called Elizabeth and insisted that she had to come see me at the apartment immediately. That it was an emergency. The line seemed to go dead and then I heard a soft “Okay,” and a click. I fretted for an hour, waiting for her to materialize. If she didn’t show up, then the tectonic plates of my emotional life were moving in all the wrong directions. It is true Elizabeth and I are no longer a couple, but we have a bond built from our past couple-dom. And that should have been enough, more than enough, to have compelled her to my home. In an attempt to stave off my anxiety, I sorted new books into my library.
She arrived an hour after my call. Burst through the door all blushing and breathless as if she’d torn herself away from a sexual tryst. Or was it merely a lonely session of drunken isolation? Who knows with her? She was probably my most opaque lover. Or was it possible that Elizabeth derived excitement, even pleasure, from racing to my aid? I’d never noticed this side of her before but people change.
I sat her down, made her tea. Her hand shook when she brought the teacup to her beautiful mouth. I outlined my spiritual crisis. I painted my despair in bold strokes. I implied that if she didn’t soothe me, didn’t touch me, I would fall apart completely. I told her that if she was ever my friend, ever, she had to stay with me. I implied that it was a matter of life and death because I had plenty of pills and did consider suicide an option. I was ready.
I couldn’t read her. She had loved me once, certainly she would come to my aid now?
She said, “Your lawyer has not returned one of our calls.”
Why was she bringing all that up now? It’s true, I had told my guy to put it on the back burner, but what did that have to do with what I was asking for right at that moment? What was important was that I needed her to be there for me. Instead she insisted on nagging me.
I heard myself say, “I thought I should do more research. Get to know you better. For my next book.”
Her neck flushed pink. Honestly, I wasn’t saying any of this to make her angry. It was more like an exploration. I was sincere.
Why did she insist on being so difficult? Why couldn’t things be as they once were, if for only ten minutes or so? All I needed was her warm skin pressed against my dying husk. I wanted to be reenlivened by her pulse, by the heat of her blood. Would it be that difficult for Elizabeth to gather me up in her arms and soothe me, if for no reason than to plan a getaway from me? But she didn’t take me in her arms. Instead she snarled, “You fucker, Richard!,” grabbed her jacket and was gone as quickly as she arrived.
I shuffled into the bedroom and lay on the bed. Seeking some relie
f, I masturbated like a traumatized high school senior who has just learned his girlfriend is going to the prom with his best friend. As I played with myself, profoundly clear recollections of my Elizabeth of twenty years ago danced through my mind. She was so lovely, so fierce. I mused on how, when we made love, she would transform once I was inside her. Tossing her head, clenching her jaw, her breath sucking at my shoulder. I would inhale her hair, loving her slick and vibrant beneath me. We would both holler as we came, momentarily freed from our horribly self-involved selves. Those were tremendous times for us. Perhaps she was like this with everyone she slept with? I couldn’t know. But she was like this with me once upon a time and that was enough. Afterward, we would lie there in peace, our hearts drumming with love. Twenty minutes later we would be fighting again.
After jerking off, I lay still, pulsing, per the usual routine, as my heart caught up. In the adjacent apartment someone was practicing Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” The performance was tentative, garnished with charming blunders. I assumed it was one of the shiny, perfect children who live next door, perhaps alone, practicing out of some sense of duty to an absent parent. On the avenue, a horn commenced to honk angrily, obviously mired in the traffic beneath my window. The sound of the piano player mingled with the equally anonymous horn honker. Only a minute or two had elapsed. I was achingly aware of two humans out there, crawling through life, vulnerable in the pointlessness of the effort. And they had no idea that I was absorbing them into myself.
Satisfied with proof that I was still alive, I jiggled a leg. I was animate. I changed my clothes and then, feeling frail, crept down to the parking garage, slipped into my car, the only reliably virile extension of myself, and entered the thick traffic aimed for Connecticut. For much of the ride I fantasized jumping the divider. Leon would be happy. He would publish my unpublished short stories in time for the Christmas rush.
As I rolled up the gravel drive of my country home, I spied a comical raccoon waddling toward the barn. Little fucker. Probably digging up the flowerbeds or tossing garbage. I leapt out in hot pursuit. The animal vanished as soon as my foot touched the ground. I sprinted, something I rarely do, and as I rounded the barn, I slipped on the damp grass and with an awkward hop landed sideways. A hot punji spike of pain lanced my ankle. I sat up. I tried to stand. I couldn’t.
I remained on the icy spring turf for ten minutes before attempting to raise myself, then limped toward the house. The seat of my pants was shredded and damp. I was trembling. As I unlatched the back door, moved through the mud room and into the kitchen I realized that had I broken something, my cell phone was still in the car, out of reach. Or if I had had a heart attack out on the lawn, I’d have been stuck there for days. Given the time of year, it would have been at least a week before anyone would have found my corpse. The possums and crows would have gnawed into my gut, sucked out my eyes.
I spent the remainder of the darkening day laid out before the fireplace reading my damned journals, the sustained notes of Verdi’s Requiem my only companion. I’m stuck in this house, the house that Elizabeth and I shared. It is filled with antiques and meaningless appliances, things that to this day radiate her personality, make her continually present in my life. As the fire in the hearth burns down to embers and the shadows draw a veil over the familiar shapes of the life we had, I understand that Elizabeth is not here in the house with me, is never here and that I am alone.
March 22, 1977
I have hepatitis, not the dangerous kind. I guess I caught it from Haim because we share plates and eating utensils in the apartment. He must have become infected hanging out in the filthy strip clubs he loves. Of course, he’s such a bull, it hardly affects him, while staining my skin parchment yellow and my piss the color of Coke. I can barely move. The doctor (a wrinkly old New Yorker who chain-smokes) told me to “keep my distance” from alcohol. Not that I have any desire to drink. Or eat. Dagmara’s been deriving great pleasure from nursing both of us back to health.
The lack of alcohol in my system seems to have improved my discipline. Even though I’m physically tired, I eked out a short story based on that guy I interviewed. Titled it “My Lucky Day.” A small magazine that publishes new writers has said they’re going to print it. I’m getting a hundred bucks which is pretty amazing.
No girlfriend at the moment. Dagmara has zero interest in me that way now. Dagmara’s friend Anita doesn’t come by anymore, probably because I had sex with her. I’m so tired I’m not sure I can get it up anyway. Been reading this guy Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. More Henry Miller. Keeping a list of vocabulary words. And a list of books read.
May 5, 2006
Drove into the city, traffic was very light, even found a parking meter downtown. The afternoon unwound while I roamed the aisles of Coliseum Books (rumored to be closing soon) and the Strand. Sold a pile of review copies Leon’s secretary sent me. Then found most of what I “needed”: The Return of Martin Guerre, Schopenhauer, Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Could have bought it all online, but it’s important to support the bookstores. Only a bookstore provides the serendipity of looking for one thing and finding another.
Sarah agreed to share a meal with me. She seemed deeply guarded and, at her core, depressed. I don’t think she can handle the truth, which is that I never lied to her. I got her to admit that she was the one who had been “lying” because she’d wanted more than I had ever promised her but had pretended that she didn’t.
The slow accretion of time we spent together forced the inevitable question, “But will it be forever?” But that wasn’t my fault and she knew it. She seemed genuinely frightened when I cornered her. I simply wanted her to admit that the fault was not mine, but hers. I had done nothing “wrong.” She tearfully confessed that she wants kids. My kids.
I told her she had the wrong guy. Furthermore she had always known who I was. So who was at fault here? Who had led who on? I pointed out that she shouldn’t have entered into a contract she had no intention of sticking to. She hurt me. I was the one who was wronged. I was the one left holding the bag. I was the one who was abandoned!
Her admission of wrongdoing was small consolation for the fact that what’s done is done. Once all of this was aired, there wasn’t much else to talk about. I sucked the dregs of my cappuccino and claimed I had an appointment with Leon. We went our separate ways amicably around nine.
By ten, I had found myself in Times Square. I was jostled by tourists munching kosher hot dogs, their souvenir Playbills clenched in pale Midwestern fists. They took pictures of one another. They gathered in teeming clusters at the crosswalks. They gaped at the shimmering, multicolored electric billboards looming high above. People get a certain reassurance by being small. They come to my city to be awed.
A spitting rain drifted in with the evening’s breezes. Theaters disgorged their occupants. The crowd thickened as the parasitic vendors and hawkers stirred the throng into confusion. Swarthy men sold umbrellas. Flyer flippers, pretzel men, smokers and spitters and cops. A fearful, excited energy rippled through the mob and the air was peppered with shouts and nervous laughter.
Thirty years ago, these same darkened doorways framed girls who chanted, “Wanna go out?” “Wanna party?” Prostitutes, drug dealers, pickpockets. Where are those wonderful folks now? Grown old. At home with their grandkids, or in a drug rehab or in prison or pushing up daisies.
I found myself tracking a woman who had passed me only minutes before. A thirty-something ingenue with a distinctive blue and white umbrella.
She paused when she got to the corner. I expected her to hail a cab, but she didn’t. I lay back, observing her, when she made an abrupt reversal and stepped into the southward flow of pedestrians and then, as if window-shopping, began to wander along the lighted storefronts. She scanned the confusing displays of the discount electronics shops giving me a chance to analyze her more fully. What was she doing?
She possessed a c
lassic profile and her clothing betrayed a certain suburban cutting-edge style. Doubtless she had arrived from parts west only that afternoon and, bored, had managed to escape from her charter group of single secretaries from Minneapolis. I sensed her appetite for adventure. I was ready to provide it. I ambled up alongside her and feigned interest in a display of nasty green Statue of Liberty replicas. I began with a question (the standard ploy of every hustler), “Who buys all this stuff?” It startled her.
Doelike, she said, “I’m sorry, are you speaking to me?”
I said, “I’m curious. Why would anyone as sophisticated as you waste her time checking out tourist knickknacks? What happened? Had a fight with your boyfriend? Slammed the door and went for a stroll?”
At that moment, a well-built black kid wedged himself between us and said, “Good evening young lady. How’d you like a free CD?” He handed a CD jewel case to my new friend. Gangsta rap, no doubt. As expected, Miss Minnesota took the CD. The kid grinned and says, “That’ll be five dollars postage and handling.” I snatched the disc and handed it back to the kid.
“That’s okay, pal. We already have this one.” I took her by the elbow and steered her away from danger. Maybe not danger exactly, but certainly attention other than my own. I smiled. “He knows you’re not from around here.” We moved purposefully along with the flowing throng.
She did not scream, “Let go of my arm!” or “Who the fuck do you think you are?” She was ready, for anything. I said, “How ’bout a drink?”
At the Café des Artistes we shared a glass of pinot grigio. There I convinced her to join me in a cab ride and proceeded to entertain her with a guided tour of Central Park, Fifth Avenue, SoHo and Ground Zero. Near City Hall, the sky cleared and we hopped out and strolled the Brooklyn Bridge. She was, of course, enthralled by my expertise on all that is New York City.
In return for my seminar on the Big Apple, I got a short seminar on her world: her job as teacher at a Montessori preschool in Ohio; her brother and sister-in-law with whom she is traveling; some details on her father’s recent retirement from his job as an oil refinery engineer. We even discussed her wire-haired terrier, Alfie, who was back home with friends. After accepting my invite earlier to show her around, she had called her brother to inform him she had “run into an old friend from high school.” Her deception kindled hope. If she could lie to her brother this meant she was naturally devious. If she was devious, perhaps she was audacious as well. (This could be the start of something! I pictured quick trips out to the Buckeye State for trysts in the local Marriott. Wouldn’t even cost much. I could use my Marriott points!)
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